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(Asian News International Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Washington, March 10 (ANI): Following the introduction of CryptoLocker, Ransomware has reportedly emerged as a potent threat to PCs around the world.

The malicious software was successful in raking in around 5 million dollars in the last four months of 2013, an amount that previously took ransomware purveyors an entire year to get their hands on it.

Johannes B. Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute explained that a compromised personal computer for a botnet or Distributed Denial of Service attack is worth about a buck to a byte bandit, according to PC World.

The research officer further said that with ransomware, the attacker could easily make 100 dollars and more.

Meanwhile, the bad app is said to be the result of an evolutionary process, leading back to the rogue anti-virus campaigns during the 2000s, which used pop-up windows alerting a user that their computer was infected.

Garth Bruen, a fellow with the Digital Citizens Alliance, a consumer safety group focused on online crime, said that the people selling the software were the same people who infected the machine, which later came to be known as 'scareware'. (ANI)
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